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Since we were talking about communication last week, I liked reading this study. Students like ways to interact with each other online as well as in class; and faculty should communicate in a timely manner and give good feedback to students.

Recordings of 60 one-hour sessions from the 2/10 to 2/21 Transforming the Teaching & Learning Environment: the PASSHE Virtual Conference. Many recorded sessions (click 2014 Sessions-by-Date) focus on teaching/designing online/hybrid courses. The virtual conference uses Blackboard Collaborate so you may need to allow the download and running of a .jnlp file.

Great pdf to share

Love this slideshare that shows the rapid development of tech. Our students are all over this and we need to be too.

What is Poll Everywhere? The fastest way to create stylish real-time experiences for events using mobile devices Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It's the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print - anywhere.

I recently remembered this article published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed a few years ago. It speaks volumes about some pros and cons (mostly pros) of using technologies like Twitter, online office hours, video chat, etc. to connect to super-sized classes. Though I do not have personal experience in teaching courses with this many students, I still think this teacher has found a way to utilize modern technologies to connect to students in new and important ways. He has taken what many of us would consider a nightmare classroom situation (teaching over 2000 students!) and made it into a classroom experience like no other. If you read through the comments, you'll see that his former students say he has changed their lives and that his was the best class they've ever taken. It's amazing to me that he is/was able to create personal connections with so many students using technology. Basically, if this guy can do it with 2,000+ students, then many of us should strongly consider how we might benefit from these technologies in our own hybrid courses.

Even though this MOOC is based on Hybrid/ Blended courses, it is still important that the instructor/teacher engage in the learning in and out of the classroom. Here is some ways to do this...

A backchannel -- a digital conversation that runs concurrently with a face-to-face activity -- provides students with an outlet to engage in conversation. Every time I think about this tool, I remember my student, Charlie (not his real name). Given his learning challenges, he struggled to keep up during class discussions.

Microsoft Office recently released this free add-on that allows you to easily record your lecture or presentation within PowerPoint, add interactivity including quizzes / external content, etc.

This link is from the Chapter 05 reading and I thought it was the best for a focus on course design issues of what to place online v. classroom in a blended course.